Where Are They Now: Elaina Mango

Last Seen: Elaina Mango-director of regional marketing and her team at Verizon were riding high as Grand Ex Award winners for their full-steam ahead launch of FiOS in 2005. Totally integrated locally customized and highly experiential their strategy involved nearly every form of live marketing: entertainment sponsorship concerts proprietary events buzz pop-ups you name it generating 500 000 one-to-one interactions 10 million impressions and hundreds of thousands of new subscribers. A tough act to follow but we’re sure Mango is up to the task. Here’s how she’s doing it:

What’s changed since the big award?
We were doing this on a national basis but we’ve now split into nine regions. We have a national team that handles mass marketing but we’ve gone regional to get more targeted and more focused. In New York we’ve doubled the number of Verizon mall kiosks from six last year to 11 now and we’ve sponsored minor league baseball and New York’s River to River festival from May through September.

And your biggest achievement?
We doubled our mall kiosks and built them in record time. We got really good at the recipe to get the live marketing out and into the market. We’ve become more responsive to the market and the local piece of what we do is a huge achievement. If I had to prioritize I would say the malls and how quickly we were able to execute them and our speed to market on some of the local initiatives. We proactively plan but we can also react very quickly. That’s all because of the guerrilla marketing we are doing. We’re out there everyday with mobile teams on the street.

What’s the big challenge for 2008?
I don’t look at challenges; I look at opportunities and there’s a ton of them for us at Verizon. We’ve got a new product and a great way to market it and lots of focus.